tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post879074123374492335..comments2023-09-29T02:49:02.989-07:00Comments on An Emphatic Umph: Don't SimplifyDaniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-90191303064256092442012-04-18T07:29:46.864-07:002012-04-18T07:29:46.864-07:00Or, the CliffsNotes version of the above: meaning ...Or, the CliffsNotes version of the above: meaning mining is far from mindless.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-647182688802229722012-04-18T07:24:52.880-07:002012-04-18T07:24:52.880-07:00Where do you think this "will to needless com...Where do you think this "will to needless complexity" usually comes from? I see it in a lot of places, especially in education. It's almost as though people (and I'm guilty at times too) feel that saying more implies <i>seeing</i> more, when in fact the sense of seeing here is different than "verboasters" would like to think. There's the sense of seeing as mere observation, and there's the sense of seeing as attributing success to the viewer — a seeing <i>into</i> rather than merely scraping over the surface. And of course this second sort of seeing involves far more than sight — or, at least, in-sight.<br /><br />It sort of reminds me of this part of Deleuze's _Bergsonism_ when he writes that "we mix recollection and perception; but we do not know how to recognize what goes back to perception and what goes back to recollection. We no longer distinguish the two pure presences of matter and memory in representation, and we no longer see anything but differences in degree between perception-recollections and recollection-perceptions. In short, we measure the mixtures with a unit that is itself impure and already mixed. We have lost the ground of composites. The obsession with the <i>pure</i> in Bergson goes back to this restoration of differences in kind." <br /><br />So if you think of a company's sales pitch as this weird sort of linguistic-thermodynamic system that a bunch of different people have added heat and work to [throwing more and more things in to ensure completeness], it's just like the way that you cannot go backward from internal energy and see "which parts" were heat and "which parts" were work: the things when initially added as apparent unities become irrecoverably dissolved in the multiplicity if they are added without care and reference to the rest of the system.<br /><br />If when you "admit" you mean that in any sense of hesitation/slight embarrassment or something, I don't think that's warranted: you not only have to redefine the contours of this entirely foreign communication, but also you then have to parcel it out, trim the fat, and then <i>re-assemble</i> them all together in such a way that it will be likely to produce an affect in people you've never met (and whom perhaps the company is not even yet aware of), and you not only have to produce an affect, but you do it in a way that it does not seem <i>affected</i> — at least if I understand your work correctly. <br /><br />So, it seems like you do a lot of things that "should" be impossible, and the fact that you not only can do these things but that you make a career out it says quite a lot about your rhetorical prowess...Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-48311978827882545612012-04-12T21:23:39.062-07:002012-04-12T21:23:39.062-07:00Here's a link to the commencement address I wa...Here's a link to the commencement address I was referring to. <br /><br />http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5THXa_H_N8<br /><br />You'll obviously be able to find the part II.drwatsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16184322472302989822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-14915777399847143782012-04-11T21:54:40.482-07:002012-04-11T21:54:40.482-07:00This is more of a related tangent than a direct re...This is more of a related tangent than a direct response. But in David Foster Wallace's - who I obviously like a whole lot - commencement address to students at Kenyon College he made a move that surprised me: he embraced the cliche. The entire speech is based around the theme that the cliche, when thought about in a certain - what I'd want to call phenomenological way, is actually incredibly complex: it reveals the ordinary in its most essential. And when you reveal the ordinary - the boring - and start really getting into the implications: ontological, epistemological, theological - all of a sudden it can become incredibly complex. <br /><br />Not sure if you've read that piece - it used to be possible to find it on the internet, but since it's gotten published as bathroom reading - which feels both terrifying and appropriate (what's more ordinary than reading on the toilet) it's been harder to locate.drwatsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16184322472302989822noreply@blogger.com